About the Society

At five o’clock on the long, bright summer solstice afternoon of 21 June, 1796, a small group of Portland, Maine sea captains gathered at Thomas Motley’s Freemasons’ Arms tavern, a block or so from the waterfront. Earlier in the year they had successfully petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for incorporation, and on 27 February 1796 Governor Samuel Adams signed the act incorporating “John Thorlo and others into a Society by the name of the Portland Marine Society.” At that first meeting the Society elected seventeen members, and Captain John Thorlo President. For some unknown reason, one Stephen Ham, who had signed the petition for incorporation, never became a member. The initiation fee was set at eight dollars, a not inconsiderable sum of money in the eighteenth century, so the Society’s founders apparently were men of some substance.

The stated purposes of the new society were two-fold: first, “the promotion of the knowledge of navigation and seamanship,” and second, “the relief of decayed and disabled seamen, and the poor widows and orphans of deceased seamen.” To finance these worthwhile goals, in addition to his initiation fee each member was assessed twenty cents a month, to be paid to the Society at its quarterly meetings. By 1800 the Society had admitted fifty-five members. Initially at least two thirds of the Society’s membership was to consist of persons who “at the time of their admission are or have been, commanders of vessels,” though up to a third of the members might be “persons of other professions” if their election advanced the Society’s “benevolent design.”